Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 14, as Nellie Bly made her way to the Hoboken docks, a man named John Brisben Walker was on a ferry headed in the opposite direction, bound from Jersey City to Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan. Walker was the wealthy publisher of a high-toned monthly magazine called The Cosmopolitan (in later years it would be purchased by Joseph Pulitzer’s rival William Randolph Hearst and subsequently assume a very different character), and as the ferry crossed the river he read The World’s front-page article revealing Nellie Bly’s plan to race around the world. Instantly he recognized the publicity value of such a scheme, even as it occurred to him that a world traveler might do better by heading west rather than east as Bly was planning to do. At once an idea suggested itself: The Cosmopolitan would sponsor its own competitor in the around-the-world race, traveling in the opposite direction. Of course, The Cosmopolitan’s circumnavigator would have to be, like Bly, a young woman—there was a pleasing symmetry to the notion, and in any case a man racing against a woman would never win anyone’s sympathy—and she would have to leave immediately, if she was to have any chance at all of returning to New York before Nellie Bly. After a quick conference at the office with his business manager, John Brisben Walker sent him off to a travel agency to prepare an itinerary, and at half past ten he sent a message to Elizabeth Bisland’s apartment, only a few blocks away in Murray Hill. It was urgent, he indicated; she should come to the office at once.

  Elizabeth Bisland was twenty-eight years old, and after nearly a decade of freelance writing she had recently obtained a job as literary editor of The Cosmopolitan, for which she wrote a monthly review of recently published books entitled “In the Library.” Born into a Louisiana plantation family ruined by the Civil War and its aftermath, at the age of twenty she had moved to New Orleans and then, a few years later, to New York, where she contributed to a variety of magazines and was regularly referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan journalism. Bisland was tall, with an elegant, almost imperious bearing that accentuated her height; she had large dark eyes and luminous pale skin and spoke in a low, gentle voice. She reveled in gracious hospitality and smart conversation, both of which were regularly on display in the literary salon that she hosted in the little apartment she shared with her sister on Fourth Avenue, where members of New York’s creative set, writers and painters and actors, gathered to discuss the artistic issues of the day. Bisland’s particular combination of beauty, charm, and erudition seems to have been nothing short of bewitching. One of her admirers, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, whom she had befriended in New Orleans, called her “a sort of goddess” and likened her conversation to hashish, leaving him disoriented for hours afterward. Another said, about talking with her, that he felt as if he were playing with “a beautiful dangerous leopard,” which he loved for not biting him.

  Bisland herself was well aware that feminine beauty was useful but fleeting (“After the period of sex-attraction has passed,” she once wrote, “women have no power in America”), and she took pride in the fact that she had arrived in New York with only fifty dollars in her pocket, and that the thousands of dollars now in her bank account had come by virtue of her own pen. Capable of working for eighteen hours at a stretch, she wrote book reviews, essays, feature articles, and poetry in the classical vein. She was a believer, more than anything else, in the joys of literature, which she had first experienced as a girl in ancient volumes of Shakespeare and Cervantes that she found in the library of her family’s plantation house. (She taught herself French while she churned butter, so that she might read Rousseau’s Confessions in the original—a book, as it turned out, that she hated.) She cared nothing for fame, and indeed found the prospect of it distasteful. So when she arrived shortly after eleven at the offices of The Cosmopolitan and John Brisben Walker proposed that she race Nellie Bly around the world, Elizabeth Bisland initially told him no. She had guests coming for tea the next day, she explained, and besides, she had nothing to wear for such a long journey; but the real reason, she later admitted, was that she immediately recognized the notoriety that such a race would bring, “and to this notoriety I most earnestly objected.” However, Walker (who by this time had already made and lost more than one fortune) was not a man who was easily dissuaded, and at last she relented.

  At six o’clock that evening, Elizabeth Bisland was on a New York Central Railroad train bound for Chicago. She was eight and a half hours behind Nellie Bly.

  ON THE SURFACE THE TWO WOMEN, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, were about as different as could be: one woman a Northerner, the other from the South; one a scrappy, hard-driving crusader, the other priding herself on her gentility; one seeking out the most sensational of news stories, the other preferring novels and poetry and disdaining much newspaper writing as “a wild, crooked, shrieking hodge-podge,” a “caricature of life.” Elizabeth Bisland hosted tea parties; Nellie Bly was known to frequent O’Rourke’s saloon on the Bowery. But each of them was acutely conscious of the unequal position of women in America. Each had grown up without much money and had come to New York to make a place for herself in big-city journalism, achieving a hard-won success in what was still, unquestionably, a man’s world. More than anything else, of course, the two women were to be linked forever by unique shared experience: partners, in a sense, in a vast project that for months would captivate the United States, and much of the world besides.

  Bly and Bisland raced around the globe on the most powerful and modern forms of transportation yet created, the oceangoing steamship and the steam railroad, sending back messages to waiting editors by means of telegraph lines that had—in the expression of the period—annihilated space and time. They sailed across the breadth of the British Empire, from England in the west to Hong Kong in the east, their ships carrying the tea and cotton and opium and other valuable goods that helped sustain the imperial economy. They traveled through a world defined by custom and deformed by class, in every country they visited, and even on the ships and trains they used to get there.

  Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland were not only racing around the world; they were also racing through the very heart of the Victorian age.

  THE AUGUSTA VICTORIA WAS scheduled to depart at nine-thirty in the morning; shortly before that a long blast from a horn sounded, warning all who were not to sail that it was time to go ashore. “Keep up your courage,” one of Nellie Bly’s friends said, giving her hand a farewell clasp. Bly did her best to smile, so that her friends’ last recollections of her would be cheering ones. Her head felt suddenly dizzy, and her heart, she would say later, felt as if it were about to burst. Her friends moved slowly away, joining the line of other well-dressed people making their way down the gangplank. From the railing of the ship she could see for miles; out toward the horizon the water turned imperceptibly from blue to gray. The world seemed to have lost its roundness, become a long distance with no end. The moment of departure was at hand. Solemnly Nellie Bly and the man from the New York Athletic Club synchronized their watches.

  NELLIE BLY WAS BORN ELIZABETH JANE COCHRAN IN WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA on May 5, 1864, though confusion about her exact age would persist throughout her life—a good deal of that confusion engineered by Bly herself, for she was never quite as young as she claimed to be. When she began her race around the world, in November of 1889, Bly was twenty-five years old, but estimates of her age among the nation’s newspapers ranged from twenty to twenty-four; according to her own newspaper, The World, she was “about twenty-three.”

  The town in which she grew up, Apollo, Pennsylvania, was a small, nondescript sort of place, not much different from countless other mill towns carved out of hemlock and spruce, unassuming enough that even the author of a history of Apollo felt obliged to explain in the book’s foreword, “It is not necessary to be a city of the first class to fill the niche in the hearts of the people or the history of the state. Besides it is our town.” On its main street stood a general store (where one could buy everything from penny ca
ndy to plowshares), a drugstore, a slaughterhouse, a blacksmith shop, and several taverns; the town would not have a bank until 1871. In the winters there was sledding and skating, and when the warmer weather came the children of the town liked to roll barrel hoops down the hill to the canal bridge and to fish the Kiskiminetas River, which had not yet been contaminated by runoff from the coal mines and iron mills being built nearby.

  Elizabeth was born to Michael and Mary Jane Cochran, the third of five children and the elder of two daughters. She was known to everyone in town as “Pink”; it was a nickname she came by early on, arising from her mother’s predilection to dress her in pink clothing, in sharp contrast to the drab browns and grays worn by the other local children. Pink seems to have been a high-spirited, rather headstrong girl, though much of what is known of her early years comes from her own recollections in publicity stories written after she became famous, at least some of which seem designed mainly to burnish the already developing legend of the intrepid young journalist. One story published in The World, for instance (the headline of which claimed to provide her “authentic biography”), told how she was an insatiable reader as a girl, and how she herself wrote scores of stories, scribbling them in the flyleaves of books and on whatever scraps of paper she could find. Nights she lay awake in bed, her mind aflame with imagined stories of heroes and heroines, fairy tales and romances: “So active was the child’s brain and so strongly her faculties eluded sleep that her condition became alarming and she had to be placed under the care of physicians.” The World’s professions of Bly’s childhood love for reading and writing, though, are not to be found in other accounts, and in the family history, Chronicles of the Cochrans: Being a Series of Historical Events and Narratives in Which the Members of This Family Have Played a Prominent Part, one of her relatives commented somewhat tartly that among the teachers in Apollo’s sole schoolhouse, Pink Cochran “acquired more conspicuous notice for riotous conduct than profound scholarship.”

  Pink’s father, Michael Cochran, had become wealthy as a grist mill proprietor and real estate speculator, and he was prominent enough to have been elected an associate justice of the county, after which he was always known by the honorific “Judge.” (The nearby hamlet of Cochran’s Mills, where Pink lived for her first five years, was named after him.) When Pink was six years old, though, Judge Cochran suddenly fell ill and died, without having left behind a will; according to Pennsylvania law, a wife was not entitled to an inheritance without being specifically named in a husband’s will, and by the time his fortune had been parceled out among his heirs (including nine grown children from a previous marriage), Pink’s mother, Mary Jane, ended up with little more than the household furniture, a horse and carriage, and a small weekly stipend. Now raising five children on her own, she embarked on an ill-conceived marriage to a man who turned out to be a drunkard and an abuser. After five miserable years Mary Jane took the highly unusual step of filing for divorce; Pink herself testified on her mother’s behalf, recounting for the court an awful litany of her stepfather’s offenses against her mother. At only fourteen years of age, she had learned all she needed to know about what could befall a woman who was not financially independent.

  Pink was determined that one day she would support her mother and herself, and the next year she was sent to a nearby boarding school that specialized in training young women to be teachers. For the fifteen-year-old, the school must have been a welcome opportunity to create a new identity for herself—it was there that Pink Cochran added the silent e to the end of her surname—but unfortunately her mother was forced to withdraw her after only a single semester; the family simply did not have enough money for Pink to continue her schooling. This fact seems to have been embarrassing to Nellie Bly, and she omitted it from her own stories about herself. That “authentic” biographical story in The World, presumably based on information provided by Bly, asserted instead that she had left “on account of threatening heart disease”: even one more year of studies, her physician was said to have advised her, could come at the cost of her life. “She was anxious to continue her studies,” The World solemnly explained, “but she didn’t want to die.”

  In 1880, when Pink was sixteen, Mary Jane Cochran moved with her children to Pittsburgh, some thirty-five miles away. She was hoping to leave behind the death and divorce with which she had come to be associated in Apollo, but Pittsburgh must at times have seemed a hard bargain. Anthony Trollope once called Pittsburgh “without exception, the blackest place which I ever saw.” It was a city given over almost entirely to manufacture, where within a few dozen square miles nearly five hundred factories turned out the steel, iron, brass, copper, cotton, oil, and glass hungrily consumed by an industrializing nation. On the horizon, in every direction, smoke poured from unseen furnaces. At night the sky burned yellow and red. The city’s wind carried flecks of graphite; the air smelled of sulfur, and a long walk brought a taste of metal on the tongue. There were unexpected showers of soot. In a neighborhood with a skyline of steeples and onion domes, where railroad tracks wound through backyards, Mary Jane bought a small row house for her family; eventually, like many of the city’s homeowners, she earned a bit of extra income by renting out a room to boarders. For the next four years Pink helped support the family by taking whatever positions she could find, including as a kitchen girl; she may also have found work as a nanny, a housekeeper, and a private tutor. (Her older brothers, having even less education than she, found jobs as a corresponding clerk and the manager of a rubber company.)

  Though Pittsburgh’s population at the time was only about 150,000, the city was able to support ten daily newspapers, more than any other American city of its size. Pink Cochrane was a regular reader of one of them, the Pittsburg Dispatch, where the most popular columnist was Erasmus Wilson, who wrote under the name “The Quiet Observer,” or simply “Q. O.” Wilson was a courtly older gentleman, and in his “Quiet Observations” he liked to espouse what he saw as traditional Victorian values. In one column he took to task modern women “who think they are out of their spheres and go around giving everybody fits for not helping them to find them.” A “woman’s sphere,” he bluntly concluded, “is defined and located by a single word—home.”

  The column, with its high-flown disregard for the realities of women’s lives, outraged Pink Cochrane, and she sat down and composed a long letter to the editor of the Dispatch. As was then the custom among those who wrote letters to newspapers, she signed it with a pseudonym: “Lonely Orphan Girl.” (It was perhaps an odd choice of name—her mother, after all, was still alive—but it was a poignant reminder of the impact of her father’s death, a blow from which the family had never recovered.) The letter caught the attention of the paper’s new managing editor, George A. Madden, who placed a notice in the next issue of the Dispatch asking “Orphan Girl” to send him her name and address.

  The very next afternoon the writer herself unexpectedly arrived at the Dispatch office. She was twenty years old but looked even younger; Erasmus Wilson would recall her from that morning as “a shy little girl.” She was slimly built, of medium height, with large, somewhat mournful-looking gray eyes and a broad mouth above a square-set chin. She wore a long black cloak and a simple fur hat; her hair, which she had not yet taken to wearing up, fell in auburn curls around the shoulders of her coat. The young woman was plainly uncomfortable in her surroundings, intimidated by her first visit to a city newsroom. In a voice that barely rose above a whisper, she asked an office boy where she might find the editor.

  “That is the gentleman,” the boy said, and he pointed toward Madden sitting a few feet away.

  Seeing the dapperly mustached young editor, she broke into a smile, revealing a physical detail often remarked upon by those who met her: a dazzlingly white set of teeth. “Oh, is it?” she exclaimed. “I expected to see an old, cross man.”

  George Madden told her that he was not going to print her letter; instead, he said, he wanted her to write an arti
cle of her own on the question of “the woman’s sphere.” Neither Bly nor Madden ever recorded her immediate reaction to his request, but the prospect of actually writing for a newspaper, after four years of tramping Pittsburgh’s soot-darkened streets in pursuit of menial work with little hope of ever finding anything better, must have meant everything to her; within the week she had turned the article in to Madden. Her grammar was rough, her punctuation erratic (for years George Madden was heard to complain about the amount of blue pencil he had expended on her pieces), but the writing was forceful and her voice clear and strong. She had chosen to address the question from the perspective of those women who did not have the privileges “Q. O.” had summarily granted them: poor women who needed to work to support their families. It was an impassioned plea for understanding and sympathy, into which she must have poured some of her own despair at the conditions of her life and that of her mother:

  Can they that have full and plenty of this world’s goods realize what it is to be a poor working woman, abiding in one or two bare rooms, without fire enough to keep warm, while her threadbare clothes refuse to protect her from the wind and cold, and denying herself the necessary food that her little ones may not go hungry; fearing the landlord’s frown and threat to cast her out and sell what little she has, begging for employment of any kind that she may earn enough to pay for the bare rooms she calls home, no one to speak kindly to or encourage her, nothing to make life worth the living?